Looking into World War Part Two, perhaps the first truly industrialized war...

I'm not so sure. Before The Great War (AKA WW I) most long-haul transportation of goods was either by rail or in wagons hauled by animals, mostly horses or mules. Then, during the war, the Army created a large fleet of trucks and trained large numbers of doughboys to drive and maintain them. This was for two reasons: first, the trucks could get supplies and reinforcements to the front faster than the animals could and second because they tied up far fewer men caring for them. After the war, much of that fleet was sold off as surplus and bought by veterans who'd been driving them over there, and were used either to set themselves up as freelance truckers or to found trucking companies, cutting the time it took to mechanize transport in the USA by several decades.

It seems like a way to do multiplication by doing addition.

That's because that's exactly what it's for, along with doing division via subtraction. And, you can use loglogs (the logarithm of a logarithm) to do exponentiation and find roots. Interestingly, I once mentioned loglogs to two friends, a physics professor and a mathematical astronomer turned programmer and neither of them recognized what I was talking about.

I notice that you confine your reply to a cheap shot about my supposed ignorance and avoid responding to my question about the battle that turned the IJN back for the first time and the one that crushed its main strike force, and taking the initiative away from them for the rest of the war.

The decisive Japanese and German defeats were dispensed by other armies.

Really? Where were all of those allies fighting during the Battle of the Bulge and where was the Royal Navy during the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway?

What do you find so funny about the University of Bologna? It was founded in 1088 CE, and is the oldest continually operating university in the world. And no, I didn't know any of that until I read your post and took a moment to do the trivial bit of research that you should have done before showing the world how ignorant you are and how unwilling to learn. Now get off my lawn and go tell your mother she wants you!

I remember once, back in the late '80s, doing some contract programming for an insurance company, as part of a team putting together a package for doctors to use to report claims. DOS was still king and the best CPU was a 486 so memory was limited. As we couldn't expect our customers to have huge amounts of RAM by those standards, or have their machines well optimized, there was a specific minimum amount of available RAM expected. In fact, we had one test machine with exactly that much memory and if the program you wrote wouldn't work on it, you had to find ways to make it fit, including overlays. I wonder how many of today's "software engineers" could manage to work with that kind of constraint. And, the language we used was C; not C++, although it was available, but good old K&R C.

If you think you deserve more pay, then ask for a raise. If you don't get one, but you still think you deserve more anyway, then go apply for another job, either within the same company or with another company.

My dad worked mostly in supermarkets, both on the floor and in management and he told me once that when somebody asks for a raise it's because they need/want more money and if you turn them down, they're still going to need/want that extra cash, so if you turn somebody down for a raise, start looking for their replacement because they're going to be looking for a new job.

Billionaires should not be in the equation of who is elected and what laws are passed in a Representative Democracy.

And how do you propose to prevent them from having any influence while still maintaining a Representative Democracy? No matter how you dance around it, everybody is supposed to be represented, one way or another and if you don't let the billionaires have their say, it isn't representative, is it?

What do you consider to be weird ingredients? I ask because there are many herbs, spices, condiments and so on that are kitchen staples in one part of the world, exotic rarities in another. As a quick example, Grains of Paradise are a standard in my kitchen, but unless you live in Africa, you've probably never encountered them. And, I remember once reading an article where the writer was complaining that he'd had to hunt down peppercorns to make a marinade.

When Heroes of Might and Magic II first came out it was sold in a box with a paper manual. I recently bought a new copy from GOG; the download included the complete manual as a .pdf.

Back when I was in college, in the mid to late '60s, I took a course on using a comptometer, just our of curiosity although I never needed to use one in Real Life. They were neat machines and could do a lot more than you'd expect. There was a way to put two sets of numbers onto the array in separate columns and have the machine do all of the sums, products and cross products for you that you'd need later for various statistical tests. And, you could even do square roots by using the odd integer summation algorithm, although I long ago forgot how to do it.

Code and graphics aren't the only things that people create on computers. There's word processing, spread sheets and various kinds of financial programs to be considered as well, none of which are practical to be used on a phone's tiny screen.

That said, i have had pretty good luck getting them to generate Python code. Never working right away, but you eventually get to that point iterating.

And how long does it take, start to finish, compared with how long it would take for you to do it from scratch?

When did Windows get virtual desktop support? Back when I migrated to Linux, about 20 years ago, I learned to use and love them. I showed friends using Windows what they were, using my laptop, but none of them were the slightest bit interested in them except as eye candy. I was once told, in fact, that Windows users "couldn't see the point" in having them. If it's taken this long for them to start to catch on, it's a clear indication of why Windows is concentrating on meaningless, useless changes: their target audience is mostly made up of people who can't adapt to change and wouldn't want to if they could.

Given a big enough body of water, it will float.

Yes, and so would Saturn. Of course, in Saturn's case you'd have to ignore the fact that it's a gas giant although it does have a small rocky core surrounded by a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen.